Today's Study Card--May 8, 2013

Most days I make myself a "study card."  Sometimes I make more than one.  Sometimes I do a separate one for verbs because verbs seem to be about ten times harder than other words for me to learn.  I'll write the study words for the day on the card, fold the card in half, and use it as a flash card, trying to guess the English translations of the Polish words first, then trying to guess the Polish translations of the English words, while covering up the words below with my fingers (or the words above if I am going up).  I might go randomly instead of in order, but my goal is to learn the words the best I can.

So this is today's study card, or at least the first one of the day.  Usually these are the words I am having the hardest time with from my Anki study deck.  For some reason, these all seem to be adjectives and adverbs today.  That's not always the case; they can be any part of speech.  Nouns seem to be the easiest to learn, as a general rule.  Maybe that's because an object can be pictured.  But even abstract nouns are easier than verbs.  Verbs seem to be the hardest.  Usually I will make separate cards for just verbs.

I always "learn" the words and then find that a month later I will have forgotten some of them.  So that's where spaced repetition comes in, to put them at the proper spacing.  All of these words are words that I supposedly "learned" previously.  But I suspect the problem is not one of memory storage, it is one of memory retrieval, because often the stuff I am searching for will just suddenly pop into my head.

Then at some point I try to collect the cards from the past week or two, go over them again, and pick out the hardest words that I am still having trouble with and put them on new cards.